The Bewildered

In their latest catalogue, J. Crew featured a spread called “Saturday with Jenna.” A photo shoot showing creative director and company president Jenna Lyons at home on a Saturday, enjoying her morning coffee, her J. Crew sweats and a round of toenail painting with her 5-year-old son Beckett. The caption reads, “Lucky for me I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.”

Incidentally, the company doesn’t even seem to be selling this shade of polish—though it does advertise a couple of more modest shades in the “necessary luxuries” section of the women’s wear shop—and it is certainly not listed alongside the pint-sized bowties and gingham shirts in the little boys’ section. But, so what if it did?

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If you ever go into your average shopping mall men’s wear store to buy a suit for a job interview, you’ll likely be told by an earnest and insistent saleswoman that you absolutely must purchase a white shirt and navy jacket. If clothes make the man—as such a saleswoman would likely agree, if she doesn’t outright assault you with that old chestnut—it would seem that all men unquestionably want to be made in the same way, at least in job interviews. But, maybe some of us would prefer a blue shirt. We might look better or feel more comfortable in blue. Maybe we believe that blue better represents us, and surely a job interview should tell a prospective employer a bit about you, even if it’s something as small as saying, “I would choose blue over white for this interview. I’m not so crazy as to think a mauve shirt would fly, but I’m not so programmatic as to simply follow the suggestions of a saleswoman.”

If clothes form first impressions, then they are also the introduction to our story, they frame the way our narrative will unfold, the plotline around which our current and future actions will develop. Clothes say a lot about us, and so we have a lot to say about our clothes. Who knows, in the end, the decision to wear the blue shirt might get you the job. And if you’re passed over for wearing blue? Well, do you really want to work in an office full of white-shirt wearers anyway?

To say that fashion is based on story-telling is hardly revolutionary. Designers, magazines and creative directors have long understood that giving an item of clothing a story turns it into fashion. Take fashion photography. How many Vogue spreads show a series of vignettes that look like they could be film stills, shots from a Cirque de Soleil production, or too-perfect photojournalistic snaps? The clothes are an afterthought, an overlay that accentuates the unnatural poses of the characters, the shoot is successful, or not, in its capacity to draw the viewer into its story.

Angelika Kocheva as Amelia Earhart, shot by Giuliano Bekor for Marie Claire Romania.

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I’m really not a phone person. I never have been, except for a brief period when I was quite young and being allowed to answer the phone was still a novelty. Incidentally, or perhaps not, that was also the era in which the library—or some other miraculous community group—offered a “dial-a-story” service, a rather compelling lure to the telephone machine. At that age, my mother was often complimented on my “grown up” phone manner. I would always answer a call thusly: “Hello, this is Carolyn Veldstra speaking.” Most callers gulped stifled laughter at that point, until one chided my mother and instilled the fear that a predator would learn my name from this exchange, track me down and steal me away. After that, I learned to just say “hello,” but it always felt too blunt, naked, harsh.

Today, I’m more likely to be told that I answer the phone with a tone that says, “I really don’t want to be talking to you.” Usually this is not true. I credit a genealogy of monotone talkers for this foible—it could be a Dutch thing. We’re not known for our radically expressive cadences. However, as an adult, I’ve realized the disadvantages to being assumed a reluctant telephonic conversationalist, and so I’ve worked on it. Though I came close to being a near-“normal” phone person when I had a “real” job, which required a professional phone presence (full disclosure: this normalcy came after I was told off by my boss for seeming perpetually disinterested in our phone conversations), it seems I can’t quite get over it. I loathe the phone, and that ire bleeds through into every tentative and bland “hello?”

What kinds of sweet nothings is Beatrix whispering to Annette? Wouldn't you like to know...

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While we’re on the subject of my grandma, I remember going to visit her with my younger brother later on in her life, after she’d moved to the retirement home, which she inwardly hated and outwardly tolerated. My brother hadn’t seen her in perhaps a year or so and was visiting while in the area before a big walk he was going to do, either his walk across Newfoundland, or the one up the coast of California. I can’t remember which. He was explaining the philosophy of the walks (and there is a philosophy—there has to be to walk all that distance), that he liked to get out and meet people, talk to them, that part of the point was to show what’s lost when people race around in cars all the time. I’m not sure how he expected her to react to this kind of idealism, but, she was completely exasperated and asked when he was going to settle down and get a real job. He said he liked the walking and that he thought about it as a kind of work. She responded by telling him that people shouldn’t like their jobs, that liking your work really wasn’t the point. She might as well have added, “that’s why they call it work.” He countered with probably the best and worst response he could have made at that point; he told her that Jesus’ job was essentially to walk around and talk to people, and so, in a way, he was really just following in his footsteps.

That pretty much ended the conversation, but not in a way that suggested he had won. You couldn’t just compare yourself to Jesus in front of my grandma and come away unscathed in her mind. I’m sure she never forgot the conversation or the discomfort that followed it; the collision of worldviews was obvious, stark, the impasse palpable.

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My grandma owned just one refrigerator in her life. She didn’t get it until the mid-1960s, just in time to chill her last daughter’s final few baby bottles. The fridge moved with them from the country to the city, to the modest bungalow that would be the only home I ever knew them in, and finally, it was left behind when my grandparents sold their house to move into a retirement home. Along with the house, the loss of that fridge felt symbolic. I’m sure it was on the new owner’s list of items to be replaced, and maybe it needed replacing, but then again, it’s just as likely that it didn’t look the part, didn’t fit in with their plans to gut the kitchen and install new granite counter tops.

This is not my grandma's fridge. She loved hams, but maraschino cherries would have been far too decadent. She also would not have purchased a product called "Tiny Taters." And I don't remember her ever making or consuming a stuffed pepper.

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Honestly, someone asked me that once. Point blank. I didn’t know her. We were standing next to each other at a set of sinks in a public bathroom and she turned to me and asked, “So, like, are you anorexic?” I can’t remember exactly how I responded. I was rendered mostly speechless by the question, and so I think I just muttered, “no,” blushed loudly and got out of there as quickly as I could. She left the bathroom right after me, and as she met up with her friends, I remember them looking at me and giggling. Looking backwards, I have no idea what she meant by her comment: did she want tips on how to be a successful anorexic? Was she trying to feel better about herself by hating on an obviously geeky but enviably slim wallflower? Was it just another example of the meaningless viciousness of teenage girls? An expression of her own insecurity about her weight? Was she spurred on by my insecurity? Could she somehow sense it? And did she simply want to reinforce it? Or did she think she was enacting an intervention, there in the dingy mall bathroom?

So, like, are you anorexic? (From The Powerhouse Museum collection.)

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